The Trinity:

It’s All About Relationship

Trinity Sunday

Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 5:1-5, John 1:1-4, 14-18                                           Rev. Todd B. Freeman

Bethany Presbyterian Church, Dallas                                                                    June 15, 2003

            Today, on Trinity Sunday, pastors around the world will once again attempt the impossible – explain the meaning of Christian doctrine known as the Trinity.

            You know that doctrine, we sang about it in our opening hymn: “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty…God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.”

            We also sing it each Sunday in the Gloria Patri, “Glory be to the Creator, and to the Christ, and to the Holy Ghost…” and in the Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Christ all people here below, Praise Holy Spirit evermore, Praise Triune God whom we adore.”

And I close every service of worship with a benediction that includes the phrase, “to the glory of the God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, now and forevermore.”

Whenever a child is baptized we are required to use the trinitarian formula found in Gospel of Matthew, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

And I know most of us grew up saying the Apostle’s Creed, which includes the statements, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord…I believe in the Holy Ghost.”

As Christians, we are constantly reminded of this ancient doctrine. But ask someone to explain what it means and most people go silent. Martin Luther, in a humorous vein, once said, “To try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.” John Wesley, founder of the Methodist denomination, wrote, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a human being, and then I will show you a human being that can comprehend the Triune God!”

Perhaps more than any other doctrine, we come face to face with the limitations of human language to express our understanding of who God is.

Before the time when it became official church doctrine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D it was simply a matter of practicing believers and worshipers who were driven by their experiences of God’s activity to the awareness that God related in several different ways to the creation. Thus what these believers came to insist upon was that God had to be recognized as being in different forms of relationship with the creations, in ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God and the only God of all, had to be one God.

This complex and profound faith was then handed over for the theologians to try and make more intelligible. They have been trying ever since.

We even took a stab at it at our last Presbytery Meeting just a couple of weeks ago.

The agenda set aside 45 minutes for a panel of four persons to dialogue about their understanding of the importance of the Trinity.

We were reminded that the Trinity defines the particularity of the God that is presented in the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. It is Christianity’s unique contribution to world religions. In the end, everyone agreed that even though we are never going to be fully able to grasp or articulate it, we should keep reaching for understanding.

One noted that it’s like wrestling with a mystery. If we had it all figured out then it would cease to be a mystery. And one of the most important things we should always keep in mind is that God is indeed a mystery. We can never assume that we have God all figured out. It helped to be reminded that the early church was more about experiencing God than explaining God – more experiential than intellectual. One person on the panel ended with the comment, referring to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, “Jesus said, ‘Take and eat,’ not ‘Take and understand.’”

The best explanation of the Trinity that I have found, and I have read tons of material on this, is in the book Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie, a theology professor at Columbia Presbyterian Theological Seminary near Atlanta. Guthrie writes:

It is true that ‘three persons in one Godhead’ is a mystery no one can understand. But this mystery is far too central to the Christian faith to be either unthinkingly accepted because we are supposed to accept it or casually shrugged off because no one can explain it.

Guthrie reminds us that the doctrine of the Trinity “is the church’s admittedly inadequate way of trying to understand and guard against false interpretation of the uniquely biblical-Christian understanding of who God is, what God is like, how and where God is at work in the world, what God thinks about us human beings, does for us, requires of us, promises us. Christians do not ‘believe in’ the doctrine of the Trinity (or any other doctrine). We believe in a living God. But the God we believe in is the God this doctrine confesses, the one living and true God who is known as [Parent, Child], and Holy Spirit. Faith in this God – and lives shaped by faith in this God – is what distinguishes Christians from people who do not believe in God at all and from other religious people whose faith and life is shaped by other views of God.”

Here at Bethany, this congregation long ago felt what a lot of other churches are just now facing, that the ancient language of this doctrine is basically meaningless and misleading for most Christians in our time, and that this ancient language must be translated and reinterpreted if the doctrine is to be the powerful expression of faith for us that it has been for Christians in the past.

Bethany was also way ahead of the curve when it came to understanding the necessity for inclusive language. No longer is it just “radical feminists” who find the language of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” both sexist and idolatrous, because it makes God in the image of a male human being.

Throughout the centuries people forget that our language about God is metaphorical, not literal. Like male and female human beings, God is a living, acting, speaking, personal God who lives in relationship with other persons. We are not talking about the gender of God (for God is neither male nor female). I know lots of folks who are still stunned when you suggest that God isn’t an old, gray-bearded man sitting on a huge throne – like the image we get of God from the passage from Isaiah. Yet how many of us still have a male image of God?

We are using metaphorical language from human experience to talk about the kind of relationship that exists between members of the Trinity and between the triune God and us human beings – a relationship that is like the intimate relationship between parents and their children.

The latest confession added to our Book of Confessions in 1991, called The Brief Statement of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), expresses this metaphorical understanding of God when it says that God is “like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who welcomes the prodigal home.”

We must remember, however, that female language is also only metaphorical and not literal. That’s why I’ve come to refer to God (most of the time) simply as God, not as mother/father God or any other mix of gender specific language.

How do you refer to God? How does the language you use influence your understanding of who God is?

You may find it interesting to learn that the Bible does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity. Neither the word “trinity” itself nor such language as “one-in-three,” “three-in-one,” one “essence” or “substance,” and three “persons” is biblical language. Rather it is the language of the ancient church taken from classical Greek philosophy.

But the church did not simply invent this doctrine. It used the language and concepts available to it to interpret what the Bible itself says about who God is and how God is present and at work in the world.

Both Old and New Testaments affirm that there is only One God.

Added to that, the first Christians could not talk about the God of Israel who was their God too without talking about a man named Jesus. They believed that here is a man who acts like God, does what only God can do. Christianity is based on the belief that if we want to know who God is, we must look to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who revealed most fully what God is like.

Early Christians could also not talk about their God without talking about the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, the purpose of the doctrine was who explain who this God is. When they talked about God as “God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” they talked about God’s work as a powerful Creator, just Ruler, Protector, and Preserver of the world and all living things in it. This first part of the doctrine of the Trinity, then, talks about God’s presence and work over us and outside of us.

When they talked about God the Son, they referred to God’s loving, self-giving work in Jesus Christ to reconcile, save, and liberate needy, sinful creatures and the created world. This second part of the Trinity talks about God’s presence and work with and for us.

When they talked about God the Holy Spirit, they talked about God’s work to renew and transform human beings, human communities, and our whole natural environment in order to achieve a new humanity in a new creation. This third part of the Trinity talks about God’s presence and work in and among us.

Three “persons” – Parent, Child, Holy Spirit. Three works and ways of relating – creating, reconciling, and renewing. The doctrine of the Trinity, which many theologians now prefer to call the doctrine of the Triunity, is meant to emphasize the unity of the three things God is and does. God is not three separate beings. Rather, according to scripture, all of God is involved in everything God does. The Trinity merely points to three different aspects of the total work of one God.

There is so much more I would like to say this morning about all these things, because we have only scratched the surface. But I’ll leave it at that for now.

Personally, I am deeply enriched and empowered by this doctrine, for I do indeed believe in a God that is beyond and outside of us, with and for us, and in and among us. That’s how I explain the Trinity.

And the bottom line: it’s all about relationship!

Amen.